I’ve got some fun things to share with you all today, including a tasty biscuit recipe, details on a new cookbook, AND a cookbook giveaway. Let’s dig in.

Russell van Kraayenburg of Chasing Delicious recently released a new cookbook called Making Dough: Recipes and Ratios for Perfect Pastries, and it’s suuuuper interesting. The book features a number of dough ratios like pie dough, puff pastry and biscuit dough along with recipes that utilize each ratio. To better understand ratios and the relationship between ingredients, Russell explains:

“Doughs comprise up to five primary ingredients: flour, fat, eggs, liquid and sugar or other sweetener. Not every dough includes all five… The relationship between the amounts of these ingredients (ratios) is what define each dough recipe and distinguish one dough from another.”

For example, if you use 8 ounces of flour, 7 ounces of fat and 2 ounces of liquid, you’ve got pie crust. If you use 8 ounces of flour, 3 ounces of fat and 5 ounces of liquid, you’ve got biscuit dough. Same ingredients, but different ratios! This is just a simple explanation, so if you want to get more into it, I would recommend checking out Russell’s book.

I find the ratio cooking method interesting, because all you have to do is memorize the ratio, and then you can make 100’s of variations. Let’s think about biscuits for a moment. Start with 8 ounces of flour, 3 ounces of butter, 5 ounces of milk, baking powder for lift, and salt for flavor. From there, you can let your imagination run wild. Try adding fresh herbs like rosemary, thyme, oregano, parsley or basil. Or cheeses like cheddar, manchego, gouda, and mozzarella. Cooked crumbled bacon, prosciutto, ham or chicken skin would be fantastic. Along with hard spices like caraway, fennel, or coriander. Mix and match add-ins any way you like! You can also play around with the flour, fat and liquid components. The biscuits could be made partially with whole wheat or rye flour. Use coconut oil instead of butter. Unsweetened almond milk instead of cow’s milk. The options are seemingly limitless. Continue reading for my biscuit recipe plus a cookbook giveaway!